Office for Windows RT

A few months ago, Morgan Stanley Research conducted an in-depth study* on the future of the tablet market. Among other things, it found that 61 percent of potential tablet purchasers consider Microsoft Office to be the single most important software feature when considering a tablet purchase. People do, it turns out, want a device that can work hard and play hard.

Traditionally, tablets have been great for reading, listening to music, watching movies, or keeping the kids entertained, but they haven’t met everyone’s needs for staying organized and getting things done. All that changed with last week’s announcement of Microsoft Surface with Windows RT, which, like all Windows RT devices, comes with the preview release of Office Home & Student 2013 RT preinstalled at no additional charge.

This is one of the first opportunities to get the most vibrant, exciting release of Office ever. Office Home & Student 2013 RT provides a complete Office experience and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It is optimized for touch, long battery life and the tablet form factor. The new Office and Windows RT devices seamlessly blend form and function, portability and productivity, and play and work in a single device.

Customers who buy a Windows RT device will automatically receive the final release of Office Home & Student 2013 RT, a few days after they first use their new device (Wi-Fi connection required). Alternatively they can manually download the final release immediately via Windows Update.

Be among the first to experience new Office and Windows together by taking a look at one of the many Windows RT devices launching over the next few weeks.

Join the conversation

My Surface arrived on Friday. I’ve been getting to know it and like it a lot. The touch keyboard is different than I’m used to but I’m getting more comfortable with it.

Office is an important part of this device for me and seems to function very nicely. My only complaint is that the SkyDrive app does not keep my files synced between the Surface and my other computers. This is very important to me because when I am on business travel I do not always have WiFi access to retrieve documents from SkyDrive. If I’m on a plane with no WiFi and the most recent version of a file is in the cloud (no pun intended) then the file is not accessible. I currently use two computers and my laptop is always up to date thanks to SkyDrive. Can you get that same functionality for the Surface RT??

Also, I am reading the forums that people are using capacitive sytlus with Surface RT and OneNote, but when I chatted with a support person I was told that "at this point there is not product that you could use with the RT." Then when in provided a link to the forum the response changed to "At this time Microsoft dos not have a product you could use. There may be a third party that has one but it’s not one of our products. So we can’t guarantee that." I’m going to order a few different styli to see what works best.

question about the Office RT version. The current preview version only works within the desktop envoirement of the Windows 8 RT. By the way this is also the same with the full windows 8 version. I not able to figure out if the final release of Office or Office RT will intergrate within the Modern UI. Meaning if activate one of the programs for example word. I will not be pushed to the desktop mode of windows 8 or windows rt.

In regard to the Surface Pro that is able to Office Outlook. The Modern UI the UI formally known as Metro is connected with outlook.com and the assiociated Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. to support the the Calander en People Apps. Currently in the preview I can connect my outlook.com with Office Outlook, but the Outlook.com app is still needed to run and support the Metro UI. I would like to know if in the final version of Office will support the modern UI and replace the Outlook.com app.